Spiritual Nutrition empowers readers to develop personal diets that are

appropriate to their lifestyles and spiritual practices.

Drawing on 14 years of clinical experience and research, Dr. Gabriel Cousens discusses nutritional issues that can help answer these questions, including raw vs. cooked food; high vs. low protein; the concepts of assimilation and fasting; alkaline--acid balance; attitudes about food; nutrients, energy, and structure building.

In addition, Cousens shares his new dietary system of "spiritual nutrition" that is based on the relationship that the color of the food has to corresponding colors of the human chakra system, hence, the "rainbow diet."

For true nourishment, he strongly promotes the connection of diet to meditation, ​fellowship, wisdom, and love.

Raw Food the Miracle Nutrition

Live foods are raw and uncooked foods, naturally fermented foods such as sauerkraut and miso, and dehydrated foods, in which the food temperature does not exceed 118°F.

They are foods that have their natural enzymes intact and have not been processed by irradiation, pesticide use, microwave, artificial additives, GMOs (genetically modified organics), or cooking (heated above 118°F through boiling, baking, frying, broiling, toasting, etc.)

Wholeness of Live Foods

The wholeness of live foods is not only health-producing, but non-reproducible by science, which tends to fragment nutrition. Live foods mean wholeness. It is the holographic wholeness of the food, the complete energy pattern of the food that brings another quality and power to it.

Cooking, and other forms of processing such as microwaving, irradiation, and genetic engineering, destroy the quality and components of the food (and we still don’t know the full extent of this destruction).

Cooking is not only risky business, but it significantly diminishes the amount of nutrients, vitamins, minerals, proteins, fats, organic acids, and other lesser-known phytonutrients such as bioflavonoids, which are key components for activating positive gene expression. Because the phytonutrients are active in live foods, they play a significant role in gene regulation. A high percentage of phytonutrients are destroyed when foods are cooked.

Effects of Cooking Foods

We need to examine the effect of cooking foods on ourselves and on the food. During normal cooking, enzymes are destroyed, the active forms of vitamins and minerals are partially destroyed, pesticides and fungicides break down to form toxic compounds, and there is an increase in free radicals. Cooking foods also coagulates 50 percent of the protein, according to the Max Plank Institute. Also, eating foods that are too hot can actually disrupt the digestive enzymes in the mucosal lining of the stomach. Eating cooked foods also causes an immediate increase in our white blood cell count.

Importance of Biologically Active Enzymes in Our Diets

On the physical level, all our life processes depend on the functioning of enzymes. They are the physical agents of life, important for digestion, for detoxification from internal pollution and external ecological pollution, for repairing DNA, for maintaining our immune systems, and for all our metabolic and regenerative processes.

​Dr. Ann Wigmore calls enzyme preservation the secret of life. Dr. Howell, the pioneer of food enzyme work in this country, says the quantity of enzymes we have in our systems is the equivalent to what we call life energy or vitality, and thinks of our enzyme level as indicative of our health status. There is some interesting evidence associating enzyme reserve with longevity and vitality.

For example, the amylase in human saliva is thirty times more abundant in the average 25-year-old than in the average 81-year-old. The total enzyme level in young beetles is twice that in old beetles. Fruit flies, grasshoppers, and rats all have more enzymes when they are young. After chronic disease in humans, the enzyme content is depleted.

Raw, natural foods come loaded with the active enzymes needed for much of their digestion. They are released the moment we begin to chew and break down cell walls in the food. This is similar to the finding that unprocessed carbohydrates such as grain and raw sugar cane have the right amount of chromium to act as a cofactor in their assimilation.

When these are commercially processed into such products as white flour and white sugar, they lose much of their chromium, so in order to assimilate them, we must draw from our own body’s chromium stores. Over time, this results in a tissue chromium depletion, just as eating cooked foods results in an enzyme depletion.

Enzymes

Enzymes contain the power of life itself. Eating a live-food diet helps maintain the quality and quantity of our enzyme pool, and thus helps promote longevity. Enzymes are living proteins that direct the life force into our basic biochemical and metabolic processes. It even helps repair our DNA and RNA. Enzymes transform and store energy in the body, they make active hormones, and they participate in their own productive cycle. They dissolve fiber and prevent clotting, they have anti-inflammatory effects and even analgesic effects, and they prevent edema.

Enzymes can help build and enhance the immune system, help to heal cancer, multiple sclerosis, and rheumatoid arthritis, and minimize the effect of athletic injuries by decreasing recovery time. Enzymes, of course, are needed for digestion. Live-food enzymes have been proven to have an anti-aging effect, life-extension effect, anti-degenerative disease effect, and a high vitality in the food. Enzymes work with the cellular structure in the cell nucleus in the cell mitochondria, which are the energy factories in the system.

Some enzymes move freely in the body as they are needed for digestion, or in the serum of our blood, and are carried to different parts of the body. Many of these mobile enzyme systems, particularly the proteases, are bound to transfer proteins in the serum “alpha-globulins.” These alpha-globulins transfer enzymes and other molecules through various parts of the body to regulate all of the body processes. When we process foods by heating them above 118°F (or boil them for three minutes), there is 100 percent enzyme destruction.

The enzymes destroyed by cooking are those that predigest the food in the “food enzyme” or cardiac stomach (the upper part of the stomach) for the first thirty to sixty minutes of the digestive cycle. Eating primarily live foods enhances this predigestion. This means that fewer of our own (endogenous) digestive enzymes from the stomach, pancreas, liver, and small intestine are required to complete the digestive work. There is evidence that the amount of endogenous enzyme secretion will decrease or increase depending on how much is needed.

This is important because of what Dr. Howell calls the “Law of Adaptive Secretion of Enzymes,” which means that enzyme energy goes where it is needed in the body. Dr. Howell believes that enzymes represent a certain amount of energy as well as an actual amount of enzyme molecules. If less enzyme energy is needed for digestion, there is more available to enhance other bodily processes. For example,if we are injured or sick, we often experience a drop in appetite because the primary need for the enzyme energy is for fighting the illness and for bodily repair.

An article in the Journal of Medical Hypothesis estimates that each cell has 90 million methyl groups at birth. All aging and mental and physical degeneration, including cancer, are marked by a loss of methyl groups. Expression of oncogenes (cancer-causing genes) and anti-cancer genes are associated with the loss of methyl groups at the cell level. The average loss is 1,800 DNA methyl groups per cell per day, limiting life-span to 65-70 years. If the loss could be cut to 1,200 methyl groups per cell per day, lifespan could increase to 95 years because DNA would function better. When we cook our food wedestroy our proteases (proteolytic enzymes) and this creates a need for more hydrochloric acid (HCL) to be used for digestion.

The organic betaine hydrochloric acid (trimethylglycine) is a primary donor of methyl groups. Therefore, cooking foods indirectly results in an accelerated loss of methyl groups because less HCL is available to donate methyl groups because it is being used in the digestive process. Therefore the degeneration (aging) process is speeded up. With age, stress, and chronic illness, the store of enzymes in our body decreases.

This is because enzymes, so critical for our health, are used up in stress and acute and chronic disease situations. As our enzyme pool diminishes with age, our ability to perform the tasks to keep the body healthy also diminishes. When enzymes decrease in concentrations in the body, the aging process accelerates. Remember, enzymes are protein complexes that are made by our DNA. Therefore, when youthing genes are activated, they also activate enzymes that maintain our health and well-being.

One clear way to preserve the body’s store of enzymes is to eat live foods, because foods in the natural state are loaded with enzymes, and these enzymes are then taken through the body to build up our enzyme reserves. By eating foods in which the enzymes have not been destroyed, we maintain a continuous exogenous enzyme input into the system and therefore decrease the endogenous depletion of enzyme energy.

There is strong evidence that the excess enzymes released from live foods or even from enzyme supplements, can be absorbed into the system to increase our enzyme content and energy. In this way, a live-food diet can actually add enzyme energy and material to the system.There are three main methods, on the physical plane, for maintaining or increasing enzyme energy in the system: eating a live-food diet, adding enzymes as supplement, and fasting.

The result of conservation and an increase of enzyme energy in the digestive area is that more enzyme energy is available for our vitality, body detoxification, metabolic function, dissolution of scar tissue and crystallized deposits in the tissues, digestion of excess fatty tissue, and regeneration.

This increased vitality and healthy make more energy available to be present in our spiritual lives and more available to be transmuted into spiritual energy. This is one way live foods enhance spiritual life. Although certain illnesses can be turned into an important spiritual growth time, it has been the author’s general observation that people with low physical vitality have less energy available for their spiritual focus.

One of the most dramatic illustrations of the importance of live foods for health and vitality is the famous study by Francis Pottenger, M.D. – a ten year, four-generation study of 900 cats. Half the population was fed a diet of raw meat and milk; the other half was fed cooked meat and pasteurized milk. The cats that received the cooked food developed degenerative diseases similar to those found in our society.

With each generation, there was an increase in congenital bone and other abnormalities and a decrease in immune and endocrine function. By the third generation the cats fed only cooked food were sterile and quite congenitally deformed. The conclusion was that some heat-sensitive qualities were missing from the cooked meat or pasteurized milk, and the only factors we know that are completely destroyed by pasteurization are biologically active enzymes. The study suggests that the absence of enzymes in cooked food made the difference.

The Energy of Live Foods

Food has subtle nutrients “general nutrients, electrical energies, phytonutrients, enzymes, vitamins, and minerals. The electrical potential for our tissues and cells is a direct result of the liveliness of our cells. Live foods enhance the electrical potential in our cells, between the cells, at the interface of the cell membranes, and at the interface of the cells with the microcapulary electrical charges.

When cells have the proper microelectrical potential, they have the power to rid themselves of toxins and maintain their selective capacity to bring appropriate nutrients, oxygen, and hydrogen into the nucleus of the cell, as well as to feed the mitochondria.

Living Light

From another perspective, Kirlian photography has been a very useful way to validate our understanding of the bioelectrical potential of foods. Different researchers have found that a luminescent field, a natural radiation field surrounding living organisms, takes the form of a coronal discharge we can see with Kirlian photography. The Kirlian photography clearly shows that livefood has a much stronger auric, luminescent field than cooked food.

​Some research even shows that a person eating junk or cooked food has a much smaller field than when he or she changes the diet to eat whole, natural live food. This leads us to the original point, which is that all living organisms are made of patterns of resonant energy or subtle organizing energy fields.

This energy is reflected in the functioning of each cell, and the electrical field of the cells maintains the integrity of the biological system. We can think of the electrical luminescence in the Kirlian photography as a measure of life force in the cell.

The stronger the life force of the cell, the stronger the electrical luminescence we see in the Kirlian photography as a measure of life force in the cell. The stronger the life force of the cell, the stronger the electrical luminescence we see in the Kirlian photography. In essence, the electrical luminescence represents the pictorial sum of the electrical potential of each cell. The obvious conclusion is that the healthier our electrical potential of each cell in the tissues, the healthier we are.

Dr. Joanna Budwig from Germany, who has degrees in medicine, physics, pharmacology, and biochemistry, is one of the first researchers to combine an in-depth knowledge of the quantum mechanics and physics with an in-depth knowledge of human biochemistry and physiology. From this lofty scientific position, she has concluded that not only do electron-rich foods act as high-power electron donor, but they also act as solar-resonant fields in the body to attract, store, and conduct the sun’s energy in our bodies.

She theorizes that the photons of the sunlight, which she calls “sun electrons,” are attracted by sun-like electrons resonating in our own biological systems, especially in the double-bonded electron cloud found in our lipid systems and in the omega-3 fatty acids such as we get in flax seed.

These sunlight electrons, called “pi-electrons,” have the ability within our molecular structure to attract and activate the sun photons. Dr. Budwig believes that the energy we absorb from these solar photons acts as an anti-entropy, or anti-aging, factor.

As a result of her theory, she believes that live foods, and particularly flax seed, which contains three highly active electron clouds in the double bonds, helps bring a tremendous amount of pi-electrons into the system. On the other end, people who eat refined, cooked, highly processed foods diminish the amount of solar electrons energizing the system and reduce the energy down from the amount necessary to create a high-electron solar resonance field.

Dr. Budwig feels that processed foods may even act as insulators to the healthy flow of electricity. In other words, the more we take in solar electrons as a result of our dietary intake of live foods, the better we are able to resonate, attract, and absorb solar electrons in direct resonance from the sun and other solar systems.

Our health and consciousness depends on the ability to attract, store, and conduct electron energy. The greater our store of light energy, the greater the power of our overall electromagnetic field, and consequently the more energy available for healing and maintenance of optimal health.

The Effect of Cooking on Vitamins and Other Foods Component

Research results vary, but most researchers indicate at least a 50-percent loss of vitamin B in cooked foods. Some losses, such as thiamine loss, can be as high as 96 percent if food is boiled for a prolonged time. Biotin losses can be up to 72 percent, folic acid up to 97 percent, inositol up to 95 percent, and vitamin C up to 70-80 percent.

Max Planck Institute for Nutrition Physiology in Germany has found cooked proteins have only 50 percent bio-availability, compared to uncooked proteins. In general, it can be said that cooking foods coagulates the bioactive protein chelated mineral forms (changes their molecular structure so they cannot function properly) disrupts RNA and DNA structure, and produces free radicals in fats and protein.

Cooking also coagulates the bioactive mineral and protein complexes and therefore disrupts mineral absorption. Cooking oils destroy most of the nutritive fats that we need, such as the omega-3 fats; this often creates carcinogenic and mutagenic by-products.

Add to this the possible mutagenic effects of food irradiation and genetically engineered foods. There are other, mostly unknown, changes that occur when we cook food. One of them was pointed out by research done at Stockholm University in cooperation with Sweden’s Natural Food Association. This showed that the heating of carbohydrate-rich foods (potatoes, rice, cereals) creates a by-product called acrylamide, which is a probable human carcinogen.

The research found that a bag of potato chips can contain up to 500 times more acrylamide than is allowed in drinking water by the World Heath Organization. French fries sold at McDonalds’s and Burger King in Sweden showed 100 times the level permitted by the World Health Organization in drinking water. Acrylamide, which has been found to cause benign and malignant stomach tumors, also causes damage to the central and peripheral nervous system.

Typical foods that contain high amounts of acrylamide include baked potatoes, French fries, biscuits and bread, and other high-carbohydrate foods.Cooking food in these modern times has an added danger. Dr. William Newsome of Canada’s Department of Health and Welfare Food Research Division, Bureau of Chemical Safety, found that cooked fungicided tomatoes had ten to ninety times more ETU, a mutagen- and cancer-causing compound, than raw tomatoes from the same garden.

He found that EBDC fungicides break down under heat to form ETU. He reports that the amount of ETU in chemically treated vegetables is fifty times greater than in the same vegetables served raw. The implications of this, with the enormous amounts of chemically treated foods we cook and consume, are worth considering.

Abnormal White Blood Cell Changes with Cooked Food

Paul Kouchakoff, M.D., presented that if a food was commercially processed and then cooked, not only did the white blood cell number increase, but there was a change in the ratio of the different white blood cell types to each other. According to Kouchakoff, the critical temperature for initiation leukocytosis when heating food is approximately 191°F, for thirty minutes.

The highest temperature he found before the leukocytosis occurred was with figs at 206°F. Interestingly, the leukocytosis needed as little as 50 milligrams of cooked food to be initiated. An additional finding that should be of interest and relief to some was that if people ate live food with cooked food of the same type, in a 50/50 ratio, the leukocytosis did not happen. He also found that this was true for a mixture of cooked foods and live foods that were not the same, as long as the critical temperature change point of the live food was higher than that of the cooked foods.

Food Temperatures and Body Function

If the food we eat is too hot, it can actually disrupt the enzyme systems in our own gastric mucus, as well as injure the gastric mucus directly. A study reported in Lancet, the well-known British medical journal, showed that 15 percent of the people tested who drank tea at 122.5°F and 77 percent of those who drank tea at temperatures greater than 137.5°F had gastric enzymatic abnormalities.

Dr. McCluskey, in another Lancet study report, found that constant irritation of the throat and tongue by hot foods, hot beverages, and alcohol was associated with increased cancer of the throat and tongue. He suggests that we dip our little finger in the hot drink for ten seconds. If it is not scalded, then we can go ahead and drink.

The other extreme is that iced drinks and cold foods can slow down enzyme function and peristaltic action. We have the choice to be harmoniously moderate, eating and drinking foods at room temperature, or at temperatures no hotter. Why does the live-food diet give us the best effect in terms of decreasing our caloric intake and maximizing the quality of our food intake?

The point from basic nutrient mathematics is that by eating live foods, we are able to get complete nutrition by eating 50 to 80 percent less food. What this means is that, when people are eating junk food, they are not getting sufficient nutrition and have to overeat, by as much as twice as much, to get the same amount of nutrition as people eating live foods. Research over the past seventy years, with all forms of mammal and other life forms, shows that…

… the less you eat the longer you live

In the process of developing health-regenerating diet, Dr. Szekely developed a way of classifying foods that, in terms of the new nutritional paradigm, reflected his understanding of food as having energetic qualities. He saw that using only the materialistic paradigm of food as calories, proteins, fats, and carbohydrates was very limiting. He felt there were four categories of cell-renewing and life-generating foods.

Biogenic Foods

The first category he called biogenic. These are the most life-generating, high-energy foods. They are alkaline producing and energy charged. They are high in enzymes, predigested complete proteins, chelated minerals, nucleic acids, vitamins, RNA, DNA, and B12. These foods, he found, regenerate and revitalize the human organism.

In this category, we have all sprouts – soaked and germinated nuts and seeds, sprouted grains, and legumes, as well as the sprouted young wheat grass and other grasses eaten whole or juiced. Sprouting is not a new development. Not only did the Essenes use this technique, but the history of sprouting goes as far back as 3000 B.C. in China with therecorded use of bean sprouts.

The process of soaking is used because it activates the proteases, which neutralize the enzyme inhibitors that keep the seeds, legumes, and grains from germinating at the wrong time. Germinating and sprouting increase the enzyme content by six to twenty times.

Plant hormones are also activated and phytates are split off, and there is a tremendous increase in metabolic activity. Starches are broken down into simple sugars, proteins are predigested into easily assimilated free amino acids, and fats are broken down into soluble fatty acids.

Vitamin and mineral content increases with sprouting; this was one of the original clues of the phenomenon of biological transmutation. Vitamin B6 is increased by 500 percent, B5 by 200 percent, B2 by 1300 percent, biotin by 50 percent, and folic acid by 600 percent. These biogenic foods have the capacity to generate a totally new organism. It is the life force of these foods that is transferred to people and aids their healing and regeneration.

Bioactive, Bioacid Foods

Dr. Szekely’s second category of foods is bioactive foods. These are foods that are capable of sustaining and slightly enhancing an already healthy life force. Bioactive foods include fresh, unprocessed, raw fruits and vegetables. The third category is biostatic foods. These are foods that are neither life-sustaining nor life-generating; they diminish the quality of body functioning.

They are life-slowing foods that slowly increase the process of aging. These are our cooked foods and foods that, although raw, are no longer fresh. The fourth category he called bio acidic, or life-destroying foods. These are foods that have gone through many processes and refinements and are full of additives and preservatives. They rapidly break down life function.

Raw Versus Cooked

Paavo Airola has stated that a 100 percent live-food diet would be ideal, but in the recognition that such a diet is difficult for most people to follow, recommends a ratio of 80 percent live to 20 percent cooked as adequate for supporting general health with a little less live foods in a colder climate. Viktoras Kulvinskas feels a 100-percent live-food diet, consisting of 50 percent biogenic and 50 percent bioactive foods, will provide maximum quality health, but concedes for city dwellers and others in transition, that 80-90 percent live food and 10-20 percent cooked root vegetables will provide maintenance health.

Conclusion

There is an obvious message here. As we go deeper into the biophysics of live foods, we begin to understand that live food has the highest quality of nutrient concentrates, the highest amount of phytonutrients, vitamins, minerals, bioelectrical energy, biologically active water, pi-electrons, bio-photons, and even the most structured SOEFs. In other words, from the physical to electrical, to SUBTLE ORGANIZING ENERGY FIELDS, live foods are superior for our health and well-being than any other type of food preparation.

Not only do they allow us to eat less food, but activate our natural inheritance, which is the most optimal activation of youthing gene expression. When we nourish ourselves with live food, we have the most potent diet for maintaining health and well-being and activating spirit that is available on the planet. Live foods, from this perspective, not only turn us into super energy Beings on the physical level, but superconductors of both electrical energy and cosmic energy. In this way, they help us enhance our sensitivity to the Divine.

Summary

In cooked foods, 100 percent of the enzymes are destroyed, 70-85 percent of the vitamins are destroyed, pesticides and fungicides break down to form toxic compounds, protein is 50 percent less assimilable because of coagulation, and there is an increase in free radical production.

All our life processes depend on enzyme function.

When enzymes are depleted, so is our vital force and health.

Wholesale destruction of vital nutrients occurs.

Vitamins are destroyed or lost.

Minerals are rendered inorganic.

Proteins are coagulated or demineralized.

Sugars are carmelized and disorganized.

Fats are disorganized into carcinogenic free fatty acids,

hydrocarbons, and acroleins.

Some saturated fats become saturated.

Starches are rendered less digestible.

Fiber is broken down, increasing transit time of food through the gastrointestinal tract.

Increased transit time means sugars ferment, proteins putrefy,

and fats turn rancid – loosening toxins for absorption.

Carcinogenic charcoal forms during some cooking procedures.

Eating cooked foods causes a pathogenic leukocyctosis.

If food is too hot, it can disrupt our digestive enzymes.

Foods can be classified into four categories according to their cell renewal and regenerating capabilities: biogenic (raw sprouted nuts, seeds, grasses, and grains); which is cell regenerative; bioactive (raw fruits and vegetables), which maintains cell energy at a high level; biostatic (cooked, but organic), which creates a slow depletion of cell energy; and bioacidic (processed and adulterated), which is cell degenerative.

The general recommendation for a maintenance diet for health and spiritual life is 80 percent live and 20 percent cooked foods, with 25-30 percent of the diet biogenic foods. The recommendation for a healing and most spiritualizing diet is a 100-percent live-food approach. A vegan, live-food diet and lifestyle could be the most potent diet and lifestyle for physical, emotional, and spiritual health on the planet.

The Result of Cooking

Leucocytosis (an increase in white blood cell count and associated with a pathological condition) increases upon ingestion of cooked food.